The question of the periodization of early science is connoted with political concerns: whether Pierre Duhem's "discovery" of Medieval Science in the context of radical Catholicism in early twentieth century France; Herbert Butterfield’s cold war notion of the scientific Revolution as surpassing any social upheaval in its historical significance; or Hans Blumenberg's generalized notion of the history of science as the modern quest for legitimacy. The "earliness" is either the fruition of an even earlier scientific tradition, or as an Athena emerging from Jupiter’s head, signifying the dawn of a new epoch. Instead of reviewing these notions of early science through the monolithic threshold, this paper will posit the multiplicity of styles of thought embedded in specific mathematical practices as enabling a different historical assessment of early science on its own terms, neither as an enfeebled ripening nor as an anachronistic precursor. To probe the possibilities of this approach I will apply Walter Benjamin's notion of Baroque with (following Elkana) Bertolt Brecht’s notion of the epic to the history of optics from Kepler's 'Ad Vitellionem paralipomena' of 1604 to Descartes' 'La dioptrique' of 1637.

Was Vincenzo Galilei—composer, lutanist, and father of Galileo—an experimental scientist? Historians of science and music alike have agonized over this question. In 1589, Vincenzo recounted observations, taken from sonorous objects including lute strings and organ pipes, that seemed to contradict classical laws of harmony. Intriguingly, he claimed to have obtained these results from "the teacher of all things": 'esperienza delle cose maestra.' Vincenzo’s word 'esperienza' has been translated as “experience” or “experiment” based on whether it appeared in practical contexts—dealing with composition and performance—or speculative contexts—concerning the natural cause of musical consonance. My talk reinterprets Vincenzo’s approach to music as a dual speculative/practical research program. Extending beyond scientific experimentation as usually defined, Vincenzo's notion of 'esperienza' entailed a balancing of mathematical reasoning, sense perception, and instrumental skill that bridged the chasm between musical sciences and arts. Just as Vincenzo used instruments to disprove contemporary theories of harmony, he implored musicians to deploy 'esperienza' towards the composition of 'vera musica,' or the "true music" given in nature. In short, Vincenzo proffered a musical art-science in which theory and practice converged towards the formation of natural knowledge. His vision of 'esperienza' would inspire many experimental philosophers in the following century, most notably his son. My talk, by investigating the musical roots of experimental philosophy, demonstrates how entangled premodern speculative science and musical practice truly were.

Herbaria, collections of preserved plant specimens, were first created in the early modern period in the 1530s. They were indicative of a greater interest in careful observation and correct identification of plants beyond written descriptions usually based on ancient writings, particularly on the first-century CE herbal of Dioscorides. As botany developed, the first printed herbals with accurate images of plants appeared in the 1530s and along with herbaria, provided a means for botanists to document information about plants more accurately than did the texts of the time. This paper will examine a herbarium that the German apothecary, Johannes Harder, created around 1595. In an effort to provide as much visual information as possible, Harder filled in missing parts such as petals, roots, leaves, and even entire flowers. I will argue that this blending of art and science is an example of one of several experiments in visual presentation developed at the time to depict plants accurately. I will draw on the work of Florike Egmond on early modern collections of watercolors and recent studies of nature printing at that time, as well as on Omar Nasim’s exploration of how drawing can be fundamental to the formation of scientific ideas.

Abstract: My method of drawing tangents, René Descartes told Marin Mersenne, “is the most noble way of demonstrating that can be, namely, that called a priori.” Descartes turned to scholastic terminology to describe his new mathematics; yet its practice involved compound compasses and scratched-out symbols, the former an emphatically banausic generalization of Euclidean practice, the latter an adaptation of merchant mathematics. Tools-based practice permeated the Essais that Descartes presented as instances of his general method. My focus here is not on Descartes’ use of artisanal techniques so much as on his efforts to naturalize these techniques within scholastic philosophy or scientia. Much has been written about the efforts of higher-status practitioners to occult the manual or intellectual contributions of technicians; I look at the ars-ification of scientia from a different perspective, focusing on Descartes’ efforts in the Discours and accompanying Essais to persuade both gentlemen and philosophers that they should care about craft. These efforts were themselves a kind of art: for example, Descartes referred to his suppressed physical treatise as a painting that represented his arguments “in a frieze.” Understanding the artistry of Descartes’ rhetoric, I argue, will require us to reconsider not just the relationship between ars and scientia, but also our own prejudices about the putatively doctrinal aspirations of the new science.

This paper addresses questions about the current shape of the humanities raised through two experimental jewelry arts workshops held at a vocational school in the Canadian Arctic. These workshops investigated the idea of an artisanal epistemology in early modern enquiries into the natural world in relation to contemporary modes of indigenous knowledge production. In the Inuit cultural context, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge is not rooted in textual traditions, but bodily embedded in oral histories, craft technology, and land stewardship. Through this lens of indigenous interaction with Renaissance scholarship, this paper reflects on the utility of reconstruction and material literacy as present-day history of science methodologies, in which scholarly textual interpretation meets physical research, as well as the nature of cultural heritage in shaping material practice. This cross-cultural knowledge exchange also engenders a wider reflection about the turn within the humanities to increasingly greater emphasis on interdisciplinary research and multidisciplinary collaborations, in which breaking down disciplinary siloes poses big challenges. How do our actions and values as scholars shape the intellectual heritage that we are creating right now, in our own historical moment? How might new collaborative practices between humanists, artisans, and scientists reorient this? Who is knowledge for, anyway?